Visual displays often include some form of touch sensitive screen. This is becoming more common with the emergence of the next generation of portable multimedia devices such as palm top computers. The most established technology using waves to detect contact is Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW), which generates high frequency waves on the surface of a glass screen, and their attenuation by the contact of a finger is used to detect the touch location. This technique is “time-of-flight”, where the time for the disturbance to reach one or more sensors is used to detect the location. Such an approach is possible when the medium behaves in a non-dispersive manner i.e. the velocity of the waves does not vary significantly over the frequency range of interest.
In contrast in WO01/48684 to the present applicant, a contact sensitive device and method of using the same are proposed. The device comprises a member capable of supporting bending wave vibration and a sensor mounted on the member for measuring bending wave vibration in the member and for transmitting a signal to a processor whereby information relating to a contact made on a surface on the member is calculated from the change in bending wave vibration in the member created by the contact.
By bending wave vibration it is meant an excitation, for example by the contact, which imparts some out of plane displacement to the member. Many materials bend, some with pure bending with a perfect square root dispersion relation and some with a mixture of pure and shear bending. The dispersion relation describes the dependence of the in-plane velocity of the waves on the frequency of the waves.
Two types of contact sensitive device are proposed, namely a passive sensor in which bending wave vibration in the member is only excited by the contact and an active sensor in which the contact sensitive device further comprises an emitting transducer for exciting bending wave vibration in the member to probe for information relating to the contact. In the active sensor, information relating to the contact is calculated by comparing the response of waves generated by the emitting transducer in the absence of a contact to the response caused by the mechanical constraint of the presence of a contact.
Bending waves provide advantages, such as increased robustness and reduced sensitivity to surface scratches, etc. However, bending waves are dispersive i.e. the bending wave velocity, and hence the “time of flight”, is dependent on frequency. In general, an impulse contains a broad range of component frequencies and thus if the impulse travels a short distance, high frequency components will arrive first. This effect must be corrected.
In WO01/48684, a correction to convert the measured bending wave signal to a propagation signal from a non-dispersive wave source may be applied so that techniques used in the fields of radar and sonar may be applied to detect the location of the contact. The application of the correction is illustrated in FIGS. 1a to 1d. 
FIG. 1a shows an impulse in an ideal medium with a square root dispersion relation and demonstrates that a dispersive medium does not preserve the waveshape of an impulse. The outgoing wave (60) is evident at time t=0 and the echo signal (62) is spread out over time, which makes a determination of an exact contact position problematic.
In a non-dispersive medium such as air, a periodic variation of the frequency response is characteristic of a reflection, and is often referred to as comb filtering. Physically, the periodic variation in the frequency response derives from the number of wavelengths that fit between the source and the reflector. As the frequency is increased and the number of wavelengths fitting in this space increases, the interference of the reflected wave with the outgoing wave oscillates between constructive and destructive.
Calculating the Fourier transform of the dispersive impulse response of FIG. 1a produces the frequency response shown in FIG. 1b. The frequency response is non-periodic and the periodic variation with wavelength translates to a variation in frequency that gets slower with increasing frequency. This is a consequence of the square root dispersion in which the wavelength is proportional to the square root of the inverse of frequency. The effect of the panel on the frequency response is therefore to stretch the response as a function of frequency according to the panel dispersion. Consequently, a correction for the panel dispersion may be applied by applying the inverse stretch in the frequency domain, thus restoring the periodicity present in the non-dispersive case.
By warping the frequency axis with the inverse of the panel dispersion, FIG. 1b may be transformed into the frequency response for the non-dispersive case (FIG. 1c) in which the frequency of excitation is proportional to the inverse of the wavelength. This simple relationship translates the periodic variation with decreasing wavelength to a periodic variation with increasing frequency as shown in FIG. 1c. 
Applying the inverse Fast Fourier Transform (fft) to the trace of FIG. 1c produces an impulse response shown in FIG. 1d which is corrected for dispersion and where the clear reflection is restored. As is shown in FIG. 1d any particular waveshape of an impulse is preserved in time since the waves travelling in a non-dispersive medium have a constant velocity of travel, independent of their frequency. Accordingly, the task of echo location is relatively straight forward. The outgoing wave (50) is evident at time t=0, together with a clear reflection (52) at 4 ms. The reflection (52) has a magnitude which is approximately one-quarter of the magnitude of the outgoing wave (50).
The procedure described is not applicable if the impulse has occurred at an unknown time t0 and the distance x from the response to an initial impulse may only be calculated if the impulse occurs at t0=0.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an alternative contact sensitive device which uses bending wave vibration for extracting information relating to the contact.